Main menu

Tag Archives: Alfresco SDK

I get asked this question a lot. When running Share from the Alfresco SDK, the admin console is broken out of the box – it simple displays an empty page as shown below.

The fix?

To fix this issue you simply turn off development mode. You can do this by editing this file:

src/test/resources/alfresco/web-extension/share-config-custom.xml

Change

<mode>development</mode>

with

<mode>production</mode>

Restart share to have the changes picked up.

Why is this happening?

To support hot reloading of server side Javascript files in Share, we have to turn on development mode. This setting will tell the Rhinoscript Processor not to compile and cache the JS files. Cool, we can now change server side JS files and have the changes picked up, without having to restart or refresh web scripts.

Alfresco has, for some reason, decided not to fix this bug, so either we can have hot reloading of server side JS or a working admin console.

The permanent fix?

Development mode is an older trick. It solves some of the old -min.js things, most which are not even used any longer. The only thing we want from the “old” development mode is to tell Rhino no to cache the compiled JS files. This could easily be done by extracting this into a config option in XML instead of having it happen via the development mode tag. This change needs to be made in the Surf framework so I expect hope this change makes it into the product in a later release, as it should be a small change.

It’s been a fun six weeks, and I’m proud to announce the beta release of the Alfresco SDK 2.0. I’m proud to be a part of this project and I think we’ve got some really cool features that will increase your productivity when developing with Alfresco and Share.

Besides the SDK, I’ve been on Alfresco Tech Talk Live, helped people out on the Alfresco IRC channel and helped start and form The Order of the Bee where I’m currently on the board. I have been neglecting my duties for the bees while doing the final push for the SDK, but starting from next week I’ll get more involved in the order.

I’ve been encouraged to write up a new revision of my Aikau tutorial, or perhaps even write a second tutorial on the subject with more advanced examples so I’ll start working on it in a few weeks. If you have ideas or some areas you want me to cover in-depth about Aikau please let me know.

I’m also happy to say that I’m going to Alfresco Summit in London this october. I’ll be joining the hackathon and I’ll be buzzing around with the bees.